Friday, 1 May 2015

May?

It's May already. Really? I feel as though it was only last month that I was sat cross-legged on the lounge room floor wrapping Christmas gifts in brown paper. Now autumn is in full swing. Even with the startling amount of rain we've been enduring lately, I still love and embrace this season in all its glory. I adore autumn and the filtered sun that accompanies it. I love the crisp morning air, and the promise of snow soon to settle on the mountains back home.

I drove home to the mountains for a fleeting visit last weekend, hopeful that even with the approach of winter there would still be something interesting flowering in the garden that I could cut to bring back to brighten our little city flat.

Sadly but not unexpectedly, anything that had flowered and flourished over the summer had retreated beneath the cooling ground in anticipation of early frosts. The vegetable patch was almost bare, save for the small clump of rhubarb that seems to defy all seasonal obstacles. Over the fence in an abandoned backyard, however, there was an ancient very old apple tree heavy with an abundance of blushing apples. For me, apples are synonymous with autumn. I didn't hesitate to take advantage. I returned to Sydney with a gluttony of refreshingly imperfect fruit, and little idea of how I am supposed to eat my way through them before they start to go bad. I've been eating them fresh for breakfast all week. And I keep meaning to stew some to have with porridge. But I also wanted to turn some of the apples into something slightly delectable and otherwise banned from our diet. Something naughty.

I carefully halved and cored a handful of them before baking them in the oven to eat with butterscotch sauce. I appropriated THIS recipe for butterscotch sauce. It's not the healthiest way to enjoy apples, but I don't regret it one bit. It is definitely a sometimes only food. Until next autumn...

WELCOME

About

In late 2016 we became expats, swapping Sydney for the English countryside. Now living in a quintessential Cotswold village, here I muse about the beauty of the changing seasons, idyllic English villages, wandering handsome country estates, and our immersion into life in rural England. I am irrevocably smitten with Britain...